Mile
Zero

The late Mitch Hedberg used to have a joke: "I love escalators," he said, "because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs."

With apologies to Mr. Hedberg, above is a picture of some broken escalators. DC has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it is a good idea to repair all its escalators at the same time--ALL the escalators, over the entire system. Also, it rained today, and you know what that means: all trains are 45 minutes late and stuffed until the doors can't close. If the engineers of the DC Metro had worked on public transit in, say, Seattle or London, commuters would be starving to death underground on a daily basis, unable to escape due to stationary trains and blocked exits.

The problem with the Metro, I often say, is that its deficiencies are completely invisible to anyone who does not commute to the city every day, and apparently those people just don't count. When tourists visit the city, they usually don't travel at rush hour, so they don't see the way the system breaks under load. Instead, they have a much more comfortable experience: big, padded seats, leisurely escalators, and spacious stations. They don't see how those oversized seats take up room needed for standing passengers, or how the escalators under repair force everyone into a stairway that's too small for two-way traffic. To a tourist, compared to something like the NYC subway, Metro must seem like a dream come true.

Just don't try to use it for anything important. Good thing there's nothing like that in our nation's capital.

Updated: Oh, even better--Metro will begin a bag inspection program. WMATA's new motto is apparently "bringing all the joy of slow, cramped, expensive air travel to your daily commute."

It's summer, and it's an election year, so there's an especially frisky crop of tourists flooding DC.

Can you sense my enthusiasm?

I work farther away from the White House and the Mall now, so I see fewer tourists wandering around outside the Metro. But I think it's no secret that DC's public transit system is the bane of my existence, and the increased presence of inexperienced foot traffic isn't helping.

Visitors to our plague-ridden national capital, I mean you no ill will. But please, when you bring your seven squabbling children into the Metro train, move fully into the compartment and don't just stand there in the doorway, gawking at the train interior as if you've never seen beige plastic and cheap imitation leather before. Please do not park your stroller across the entire escalator, forcing everyone to wait behind you during the long ride down. And for all that is holy, only one person needs to buy your ticket or SmartTrip card. You do not need to huddle around the machine in a pack, like cro-magnons before a silent, black obelisk.

Now, even to my ears, I sound a little bitter. In a conversation with a coworker, we were talking about why people here get so annoyed at tourists--after all, most of us probably were tourists here at one point. Why the lack of empathy? No doubt it's partly that the city tends to attract (and create) type A personalities. But I suspect that the transformation has more to do with familiarity with the DC Metro's capricious ways. To outsiders, we may seem to be rushing short-tempered toward the train--but we know that if we just barely miss this one, who knows when the next one will come? At any minute, the Red Line could shut itself down again due to moisture, or a train could disable itself for no good reason, holding up the whole system and doubling the crush when it has to offload passengers.

Tourists catch the brunt of this, because they're not aware of the thousand ways that Metro riders have evolved mechanisms for rushing to catch hypothetical trains. The fact that they crowd the system and make it more likely that something will break doesn't help--but that's not their fault. So I'm sorry, tourists. I didn't mean to yell. Friends?

Awesome. Now, can you please get out of my way?

Rule 1: If I leave for work early, the train will break down or be delayed.

Rule 2: If I leave late, everything will run with bizarre and uncharacteristic efficiency.

Either way, the Metro will deliver me to Farragut West at 8:54AM, almost precisely, every morning. Except when it doesn't, because either I exceed its ability to compensate or because someone leaned against a door and put the next 10 trains out of commission.

Worst underground system on the planet.

I think the woman who hands out the Examiner at Ballston Metro is going to crack soon. She stands at the top of the escalator, loudly pitching the paper to anyone who walks by. "Free Examiner." she says, a sentence that would normally have an exclamation point in it, but her tone makes it clear that she knows what's going on. And she's not happy about it.

The Examiner got its start when the Washington Post started handing out a stripped-down free daily called "Express" to Metro riders. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers do that kind of thing to A) increase circulation numbers, which otherwise decrease and hurt ad revenue, and B) hook young professionals that would normally get their news online. A Denver billionaire named Philip Anschutz decided that he'd get in on that hot, hot, loss-leader action--but his would be a poorly-edited right-leaning rag targeting not just Metro riders but also rich white neighborhoods. And thus the Examiner was born.

So in any case, although Ballston is largely rich and white, those parts of its demographic also tend to be liberal and literate. So almost no-one takes a paper from the woman at the top of the escalater muttering "Free Examiner." The few people I ever do see reading the paper tend to be either angry-looking women in their forties or white-mustached men in their sixties, invariably wearing the kinds of leather safari hats that indicate someone's going to stand up for Great White Hunters no matter what those pansy liberals say. I'm starting to hear a note of panic creeping into the Examiner woman's voice, standing there with all those unread papers. It may be time to start taking the elevator instead.

The following is an excerpt from the Audubon Guide to the DC Metro System, pages 12-15)

YOUR METRO DRIVER - A Rare and Hidden Species

Listen carefully! While riding the DC Metro, you may be treated to a series of squawks and bleats from above, perhaps even resembling human speech. If so, you've had the rare pleasure of hearing the exotic WMATA Driver. A solitary species, they are rarely seen out in the open, instead preferring to remain behind the glass of the front cab. Although this has given them a reputation as mere myth, we can assure you that they do exist, and a patient observer may reap the rewards of their strange and wonderful calls. Here we present a list of the various sub-species, identified by their sonic character:

• THE THREE-STRIPED BOREDOM WRANGLER - Most female drivers fall into this category, as well as a significant number of the males. The call is a short monotone, containing only the most necessary information. The station's name may be reduced to one word, if possible. Oddly, these are the type of Metro employee most often found making blanket security announcements for the line. It may perhaps account for some of the district's ennui when the words "terror alert level red" can be delivered in the same blase tones as "pickup, aisle three."
• THE TWO-TOED MUMBLER - Increasingly common, the Mumbler seems to use a dual strategy for avoiding predators--first, it speaks softly without moving its lips at all. Second, whenever possible the microphone is pointed away from the Mumbler (even better, out the open window or at a particularly noisy piece of machinery). The combination of both factors assures that calls from this species are barely heard, because of low volume or the masking effect of loud feedback and grinding noises.
• THE RED-BELLIED ANNOUNCER - No shy bird, this! The Announcer has the golden tones of a radio personality--and one day, if he (the Announcer is invariably male) flashes his red belly and pronounces "Franconia-Springfield" clearly enough, perhaps some young hot-shot producer will snatch him right up. Until that day, this species of Metro driver will continue to call out the current station, the last station, the next station, any points of interest found there, the time, and an admonition to have a great day with every. single. stop. Those who are not cheery morning people should consider waiting for the next train.
• THE UNSTEADY WARBLER - There is the distinct possibility that this driver is not actually a member of the species, but is in fact a crazy homeless person who has wandered in and found himself behind the controls. He doesn't speak as if English is his first language--in fact, it's hard to imagine what his first language could be. The Warbler's calls are filled with odd pauses, snorts, and extended syllables. His tone wanders up and down without any relation to the words or their position in the sentence. The result can be frightening--Foggy Bottom becomes "Fog-gy (gulp)BOTm," while he may also remind you that "the TIME is... seven FIFty-three AAAAAAAAAAAA-em." We consider the Warbler dangerous to the sanity of sensitive riders.

Study this guide carefully, and soon you may be able to check off all four sub-species, completing your Metro experience. Note for superstitious readers: we here at the Audubon Guide to the DC Metro System have heard rumors of a so-called "normal driver" who reads the stops and only the relevant information in a pleasant and clear but not overbearing tone of voice. However, we have it on good information that this phenotype is, unfortunately, extinct or nearly so.